Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  “Philip, darling,” she said, “do you remember that thing of the garter?”

  “You mean about Pam, that time? And Syllie? And Pam’s shoes? Never forget it.”

  “God, how many years ago. It’s all gone, darling.”

  How had the subject of crossings come up that night? Hard to remember. Some memories are so clear, some slip away like thieves. It was that night, though; that night when Sylvia was jealous of Pam over my Philip.

  This trip of filthy Indians. Our Philip’s romantic ideas were all very well when we were leaning against linen-covered pillows at 514, with a fireplace fire twinkling: Acoma! To see the rock of Acoma, where death came for the Archbishop! To see in one’s mind Willa Cather, that imperious young sack of gravel and style, riding all those dusty, sun-stretched miles on horseback in a double-breasted suit and a Cavanaugh fedora with her female companion to see the church on the startling mesa with the timbers two feet thick and fifty feet long in the roof that had been hauled by Indians under the priests’ whips from faraway Mount Taylor, what’s now called Mount Taylor. Philip with those liquid warlock eyes could put you in an ecstatic trance, and the first thing you knew you were in a drawing room on the Super Chief having dinner brought when the Chablis was chilled enough, on your way to his vision of Acoma.

  But the reality. When one learned that one had to walk up the col to the top of the mesa, to pay to see a lot of dirty Indian mud huts, it was easier, while Philip and the Pretz boy panted onward and upward, just to stretch out in the dust against the adobe wall beside that simply mountainous harpy of a souvenir-selling Indian granny, as big as Sampy Ferguson, who can’t ride in taxis because the doors are too narrow. The old shamaness started out, waving her hands as if sprinkling dew over her junk on the cloth in the dust, with a couple of grunts of the sort she’d learned from movies that real live Indians use for conversing, but finally, when she saw I was just as tough as she, relaxed into some of the straightest talk you’ll ever hear about her racket: going native. She had a black blanket over her shoulders, and she looked like Vivien, the Lady of the Lake, only she was fat and her lake was dust, sand and dust, bones and dust and sand.

  But the trip had been all all all Indians, Mexicans, Negroes—swarms and swarms of the colored ones, various colors but a monotone of resentment of us. That’s it, you see. It’s all gone. We’re the new minority. There was a time when a white Protestant person, with the backing of a letter of credit, was in charge of the whole tickety-boo, but now we’re moving into a shadowy area; you hear them crowding and whispering, and the next thing you know they’ll jostle you in the street and—unthinkable—spit. When you add the Jews, and the dark Irish—they’ve got that Moorish strain somewhere, and the sardonic lips. Oh, Philip, I tell you. “Darling, if I’m jostled by one more jig or spic or wetback or Big Chief Squattum-on-Ground! I’ve had it, my sweet.”

  “What talk, Venus. Hush, honey. We’ll go abroad tonight and get a change of air.”

  “And get heartburn on those disgusting tamales.”

  “It’ll be charming, Venus. They’ll give us half a limón and some salt to suck off our wrist with the tequila.”

  “You’re a fat shoat, just one interminable digestive system attached to a little suckling mouth.”

  “Oh, now, Venus, honey, it was your idea to go abroad.”

  “I know, but I’m tired of having all the ideas, Philip.”

  Here we are sitting in the bar of the Whatyoumaycallit Hotel, in El Paso, with a picture of Kennedy among the bottles, imagine having a new President who seems to be half your age—for we are seventy-nine, and he, our Philip, is a tagalong seventy-eight. But Philip is married to us, in sickness sickness and in health, and is steady behind the wheel of a Hertz Galaxie, that’s the big Ford, he keeps saying, boring dear old stomach man, a dear, a dear. “You’re a dear, my dear. Please pardon your poor little hag wife. Sometimes I don’t think I can stand it.”

  “Venus.”

  “You’re really very sweet to me, you know. Do we miss Sylvia?”

  “Now, honey, please let’s not have another quarrel.”

  “All that was aeons ago, in Prohibition actually. Who cares anymore?”

  “You do.”

  “That’s true, darling, I do. Passionately. That’s why I’m so much younger than you are.”

  Why did we always travel around à trois? Sylvia that day on the white ship under the rainbow going into Gibraltar with a billion dolphins playing around the bow. A flutter of a Hermès scarf at her throat. The water all yellow at the edge of the tide change off the breakwater. Syllie was good for Philip for a year. The ennobling effect of love; you simply cannot do anything ignoble when you are near the loved one—except, perhaps, cheat on your dearest wife. How playful he was on that trip! He phoned up from the lobby of the Aletti in Algiers, when one was so worried, and one simply blurted, “Oh, you’re there, Philip!”—relieved.

  “No, I’m here,” he said, “and you’re there, Venus. You say I’m ‘there’—‘You’re there, Philip’—but I’m here, and you’re not here, so if you say I’m ‘there,’ and you’re not ‘there,’ because you insist that ‘there’ is here, and ‘here’ is there, then where are you, Venus?…I say, are you there?”

  I was worried even though Sylvia was not really interested in bed; she broke into a cold sweat when a man touched her, even by accident, so Philip felt like a lion, and I felt safe, though Philip was in fact cheating again, all over the place, but not with Sylvia, she was his protective coloration; he was cheating on both of us. Syllie had that quick cutting edge. She learned the entire Culbertson system really in twenty minutes; knew by ESP where every card was around the table. Her voice used to tremble when she started arguing with a weak man, and she always did—like a cat that can’t help jumping into the lap of the only ailurophobe in the room.

  “I have a headache.”

  “Thinking about Sylvia, Venus?”

  “Damn you.”

  But you see, Philip is one of those rare people who are kind and good by nature, not one of those who become so after an extended inner struggle and may relapse. He has such odd dreams—of a motorcycle, just last night, in the shape of a tubelike red fire-enginey metal horse. The little Upmann cigar tube sticking out of his breast pocket. Dear Philip, a parlayer: he inherited money, married it, and made it, too. He exercises his money, as he does his kindly instincts, with a natural grace, for he’s unostentatious and yet unerringly correct: he sensed the cummerbund was coming back the year before it did. He’s sure of himself. I take partial credit for that. He knows he can count on his poor Venus. The night he gave me that nickname, before we’d ever even gone to bed together, we’d driven down after a party for a skinny-dip, and Pam, the bleeding heart, one charity committee after another, lost an earring, or said she did, in the sand, and squealed to Philip—they’ve all been after our Philip—to turn on the headlights, and by gorry she’d “lost” the earring right in their beam, and there she stood in her opulent Rubens altogether, bumping and grinding ever so subtly, her breasts like huge hot haggis puddings, but Philip, dear Philip, having no eyes for such a feast, met me as I came out of the water, with wet hair seaweed-runny on my face, to see what was going on, and he whispered, “You’re so beautiful, my Venus on the half shell.” Venus ever since.

  I didn’t know what he meant by the half shell until years later, when he marched me up those long stairs at the Uffizi and showed me the Botticelli.

  One of the reasons, I suppose, that I’m so tired is that I haven’t slept a wink—in bed, at least—on this whole trip; I doze and doze in the car, the red rocks a blur along the edges of the cinemascope, nodding through a budget Western. This really is the Sandman’s Land, but at night he doesn’t sprinkle my eyes, he grits my teeth. At Canyon de Chelly—which our traveling companion, the Pretzel, had told us was such a “dolling little crack in the earth’s crust,” he can�
��t say “darling”—they petrified you by setting out in a jeep with grotesque balloon wheels because, as they loudly announced, there was danger of quicksand in the foot of the canyon, gobbling up ordinary cars, a party of four from Minnesota had been swallowed just last Tuesday, nothing left but a visored straw cap. On the walls of the caves, above the primitive dwellings and the ancient pictographs, you saw the archaeologists’ signatures—was it Schliemann who dug up Troy signing the cavern wall like Kilroy Was Here? But the point was this generator, poppety poppety all the living night, across the way from us, and bourbon wouldn’t stop it, pounding wouldn’t stop it, weeping wouldn’t stop it; and even an offer of money by our Philip at two o’clock in the morning would neither stop it nor get us another bungalow. And little Pretz slinking around murmuring about the dolling canyon.

  Money wouldn’t stop it. There are some things you just know in advance money won’t stop, but there’s no real harm in trying, our Philip says. Because, you see, we looked at the world and made a basic decision: spend it. Dump it at any cost. It’s poison, both to have and not to have. But if you don’t have it at least you have an incentive to get it—something to live for…. Oh, come now, one has really lived for moments like that one on the terrace at Agrigento, hasn’t one, Venus? Hasn’t one? When we first walked out on that shiny terrazzo Veneziano surface and almost swooned at that evening’s first look at the Sicilian hills and the enchanted sea? Wasn’t there a time when a mere view was enough to live for?

  But think what has happened to the charming golden nymphs and fauns who were at that party for Charley and Pam. Syllie—a full vial of sleeping pills. Charley—a regular one in Reno, a quickie in Mexico, another full-term one in Reno, another quickie in Alabama, and constantly jobless, not that he ever needed a job: a rolling stone gathers no boss. And Pam, fighting for her causes and sleeping around up the ladder, until, poor ambitious girl, she married that battling liberal with the spongy nose, Senator Tadpole, or whatever his name is, who promptly got unseated the next November. Pam, Pam, you luscious Puritan! And Sue-Sue in and out of Riggs; and Frickie on the booze; and weren’t the Jellinans there?

  “Darling, what ever happened to Hugo Jellinan?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

  “He dribbled all his money down some mine shaft in Chile. He just stopped being around. Someone told me they saw him in, he was living in, Quincy, Illinois, I think, some unbelievable hole like that.”

  You see? Our Philip is the only survivor. He hasn’t changed one bit. Stormy strong man. Oh, darling, what I’d give to have one or two of these middling decades to do over again with you! Mephisto, come bargain with me. I’ll give you some delightful considerations. I wouldn’t want the very youngest decades; something riper.

  “What would you think of being forty again?”

  “Well”—what a responsive one he is!—“first we’d take that sailing trip down the Windward Islands, and at Tobago Cay we’d moor right against the sandbank in the gut there, and after dinner the crewboys would play for us—that out-of-tune guitar and the tiny flute-fife making a yellowbird’s song high in a banyan tree—and they’d sing; ‘Mary Ann’: I love that line, ‘All day long she’s sifting sand,’ I see her on a beach with little children crowding around her, she’s some kind of sex saint…. ‘All day long—’ ”

  “Don’t sing, darling. You spoil the effect.”

  Our eyes are closed. We are riding down the trade winds on a broad reach under the lee skirts of Martinique: the high cone of the Grand Piton with a cloud for a hat. A call for elevenses, rum and lime. A smelly cheese and some Huntley & Palmer water crackers. Blue sea like a lifetime ahead.

  “Remember Ubo?” Philip says. Mulatto child we were told about, given name actually U-Boat, born the proper number of months after a Nazi submarine surfaced in Marigot Bay and a foraging party went ashore for fish and vegetables.

  “Don’t keep talking about what the whites have done to the coloreds, Philip. It makes me jumpy. I told you I have a headache.”

  “How about a pause that refreshes?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Two-forty.”

  “We really ought to have some lunch. Bother, I’ve lost interest in lunch. Tell that dear man to build me a Grand-Dad highball, Philip.”

  Philip, who cannot get the bartender’s eye, though we are the only ones in the bar, is too well-bred to snap his fingers or hiss or clap—there’s a sort of permanent Links Club hush about Philip—gets up and goes over. We can see from our seat that this El Paso mestizo barman doesn’t have the time of day for the highball bit, a fleeting moment of disgust, a shadow of buzzard’s wings crossing over his face. He pulls at the ears of his dirty monkey jacket. A glare on the glazed wall is reflected from a passing car in the street. There’s a circular mirror, with a border of wreathed leaves, and a portrait of our new President, Jack Kennedy, sitting on a glass shelf at the center of the mirror, grinning at us. Captive ambers of booze are lit from behind by a fluorescent light which flickers, sending coded messages to the moths of the world. Two or three moths flap in extremis among the bottle necks. We are overcome with sadness; we begin to weep.

  “Venus! Venus pie!” Philip, coming back, flipping at the sight of tears, says in his baby-talk voice that is so incongruous coming from the end who caught Hobey Clark’s pass in the last quarter of the Harvard game in senior year and carried the ball—he says to this day it felt as heavy as a mail sack full of stock certificates, a crazy image, because he wasn’t a runner on the Street until the next year—seventy-three yards to score. He wants to know what’s got us sloppy.

  “It’s the whole thing, Philip. Whatever do you suppose possessed Syllie?” To take enough pills to reach the longer sleep. Long ago.

  “You and your headache,” Philip says, and there’s a bead on the edge of his voice; he hones it off with a single stone blasphemy. “Christ.”

  At once the weight in my chest levitates, and I feel fine. “Did runners have to go in the mail room back when you first went to work for Peters, Silliman? I mean, they wouldn’t have those snippety little executive trainees doing anything sordid like that now, would they?”

  “We didn’t have a mail room. It was all one big bullpen.”

  “Why do you blow a gasket every time I mention Syllie?”

  “Why do I? Darling, I think you got sunstroke yesterday when we stopped for that picnic.”

  Our bottom hurts. We ask Philip to be an angel and go up to the room and get us our lifesaver, as we call it, a little tubular rubber ring our bottom-doctor prescribed for us that has a petit-point slipcover we made last summer with a motif of vine leaves. I think it’s darling; Pam tells me she thinks the petit point calls attention to “it,” as she calls my pain, but I ask her, Wouldn’t the bare rubber call attention to it more? I mean, carrying the object around, entering a room. You see, I think many people do things in the name of honesty that are really not quite straight. Certainly “honesty,” the way Syllie used to bandy it about, can become at times the moral equivalent of assault and battery. I don’t think it hurts to cover hurts—the bandage principle of human intercourse—maybe I’m Victorian but I can’t help it. Syllie couldn’t help it either. She didn’t mean to be cruel; she said she was honest.

  While Philip is gone I wink at the bartender and he brings me a refill. He is charming. The Spanish s. “Escuse me, Miss. You ’ave esscotch?” Imagine the inborn courtesy, calling a ruined fortress like me “Miss.” No, that was my husband who had the Scotch, mine was bourbon. He gets the drink and chats with me; he has had a couple himself; don’t forget it, bartenders tell their own troubles just as much as they listen to others’. He is delightful. A sort of lugubrious pinchy behavior simply because I am a woman. I was beautiful once; Philip made me believe that. Venus. This Manuel sees it in me. When you deal with the coloreds individually, you
can get along swimmingly, each one can be a joy. It’s the mass, the abstract, that’s so hard to think about. Of course this Manuel is only partly colored. He is talking about the Kansas City Athletics, for some reason, and I try to imagine what it would be like if we, the white Protestants, were the bartenders and mop women everywhere, and the coloreds were the tip givers. Of course our Philip would be splendid. Basically he likes people, and I really don’t think it comes from being rich; he received good tough fiber in his chromosomes. He would make a topnotch railway porter, for instance, truly first-rate. Oh, I can see him cheerfully flipping up the drawing-room berth along about Elizabeth, New Jersey, on the way in, with a jolly loud clankety-clank to waken the grumpy ace of spades in the lower in the next compartment who shouted in such an ugly way at Philip’s colleague, the white Protestant room-service waiter from the dining car, the night before. It certainly is a changing world we live in.

  Philip is back. He notices I have forged ahead on my own; not a flicker of disapproval. Philip’s magnanimity has kept me from drinking too much. Sue-Sue was always frowning and shaking her head at Frickie, and look at him, you can’t call him a lush; lush is too soft. He’s a roaring souse. I can’t take him anymore.

  When you thought about it, all of life had been one last fling. I mean, when you live with a man who lets live, it all has a rampant feeling, headlong, estral, tropical.